Interference and Communications among Active Network Applications

This paper focuses on active networks applications and in particular on the possible interactions among these applications. Active networking is a very promising research field which has been developed recently, and which poses several interesting challenges to network designers. A number of proposals for efficient active network architectures are already to be found in the literature. However, how two or more active network applications may interact has not being investigated so far. In this work, we consider a number of applications that have been designed to exploit the main features of active networks and we discuss what are the main benefits that these applications may derive from them. Then, we introduce some forms of interaction including interference and communications among applications, and identify the components of an active network architecture that are needed to support these forms of interaction. We conclude by presenting a brief example of an active network application exploiting the concept of interaction.